“I just mean, sweetheart, when you find him, you’ll feel complete,” she said sweetly as she brushed a piece of hair out of my eyes.
“Did you feel complete when you met Daddy?” I asked, sadness creeping down my throat at the blurry memory of a man as big as a bear who always smelled like peppermint and those cigarettes he used to smoke constantly as he anxiously paced around the room.
Something in my mother’s eyes flickered and changed. There was a look there that I didn’t recognize, but which made my little heart uncomfortable because it was so unfamiliar from the gentle looks my mother always gave me.
“Do you promise it will be like that?” I spit out, suddenly desperate for that look in her eyes to go away and for her to give me the reassurance I could always expect from her.
“I promise,” she whispered, that look in her gaze fading slowly away.
I settled back into my pillows, ready to hear what Harry, Ron, and Hermoine were up to next, confident that the future was bright because my mother had said so.
Too bad my mother turned out to be a liar.
“Holy shit,” I screeched, swerving out of the lane as something black…and furry, sprinted across the dim light of my headlights, startling me out of my journey to the past where I had no business spending time in the middle of the night in the freaking mountains.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered as I slowed down even more and tried to look around.
An even larger furry beast suddenly sprinted in front of my car, and this time, I yanked the steering wheel way too far to try not to hit it.
I screamed as my car went flying past that white line and careened off the embankment, the guardrails nowhere to be found. I went a few feet as I frantically pressed on the brake, those visions of my car tumbling down the mountains suddenly coming true right before my very eyes.
Was this how it ended? A sucktastic life ending with a fall down a mountain in the middle of nowhere.
Only me.
Shrubs and small trees…combined with my braking power, succeeded in slowing down my car, but the pine tree on the edge of the thick forest in front of me succeeded in stopping me completely. I choked on a scream as I hit the tree. The impact sending me flying forward as the airbags burst out of the steering wheel and door. I hadn’t hit the tree very fast, but the force of the airbags sent me backwards, my neck whiplashing as it snapped back. The airbags ripped at my skin, burning my forearms, and a noxious plume of gas filled the air.
The silence after the crash was deafening for a long moment. But then a loud buzzing filled my ears as the adrenaline crashed against my veins. I coughed, wearily trying to wave my hand around to clear the air, the enormity of what had happened settling over my skin.
“Fuck,” I gasped out. The human mind was truly exceptional. I mean, the fact that it could feel a myriad of emotions all at once as I was now.
Incredible.
“No, no, no,” I cried out as I hit at the airbag and steering wheel in front of me.
My head and neck were beginning to hurt the longer I sat there, and a glance at my arms showed me that I did indeed have burns and lacerations from the stupid, fucking airbags.
“Okay, you can figure this out,” I coached myself as I quit beating at my steering wheel and turned my attention to unlocking my seatbelt, which judging by the pain I felt in my chest, had definitely stopped me from flying through the windshield.
Small mercies.
After the seatbelt was successfully dismantled, I struggled against the car door, the movement sending agony against my protesting muscles. This is why you shouldn’t live on gas station snacks and fast food for weeks on end, I thought to myself. Maybe it wouldn’t be so hard to open a small thing like a car door if my muscles actually existed in my arms anymore.
Success! The car door finally flew open, and I promptly fell out of my seat into the shrubs and rocks that were waiting for me just outside. Apparently, my legs weren’t working anymore.
I shivered as I looked around. Somehow, my lights were still working, and the area around me was eerily illuminated.
There was a thick forest just ahead of me. And although I couldn’t see anything…it felt like something was watching me.
I shivered again and decided it was best to try and get to the road and see if I could flag someone down for help. Although really, that was probably worse than staying here by the trees. I’d seen the news, I knew the danger of trying to hitchhike, especially out in the middle of nowhere like this. With my luck, I’d get picked up by a mugger or a murderer…or even Alistair. And not to mention those two animals I’d seen…
I groaned and reached back into the car to grab the tiny flashlight from my door that I’d picked up at…you guessed it…a gas station, and then I limped my way back towards the road, which was a seriously difficult task since I’d fallen down a shallow embankment. The roots, rocks, and weeds didn’t exactly help. I was not a hiker. I was only a few feet away from the road when a howl ripped through the air. I stopped in my tracks. That thing inside of me that had been there for as long as I could remember perked up at the sound. There was a time that a wolf’s howl meant home. A time that I believed my howl would once call out into the night. My mother had promised that it would be a moment I would remember forever.
That was just another one of her lies.
Although I’d once welcomed the howl of a wolf, right now, the sound was a reminder that I was in the wilderness and there was a real possibility that I could be eaten. There weren’t any shifters out here, I’d seen the map many times as Alistair tried to plan world domination or whatever it was that he was interested in. Which meant the howl I was hearing was not a good sign.
Fuck, I sighed. I really was cursed. Deciding to proceed with my plan, I finally made it to the roadway, praying the next car that came by didn’t contain a psychopath. I’d definitely already had my fair share of those.
I waited.
And I waited.
And I waited some more.
How was it I couldn’t get cars off my ass earlier, and here I was, actually wanting cars to be on my ass, and they were nowhere to be seen? Had I taken a wrong turn somehow and stumbled upon a road that no one went down? I squinted at the road, trying to see if it looked like it was in disrepair. I hadn’t noticed any out of the ordinary bumps.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” I screamed at the night sky, cursing at it for what felt like the millionth time.
Sighing and deciding I was going to just have to walk off this mountain myself, I set off down the dark road.
Weren’t the stars supposed to be brighter out here? Where was the freaking moon?
I stumbled over a rock and barely caught myself with my hands. Of course, catching myself meant scraping my palms on the coarse asphalt and dropping my flashlight.
“Shit,” I whispered, picking myself up and cradling my hands against me as the pain shot through me.
And there was a wolf howl again.
Perfect.
I’m sure the smell of my bloody palms was going to get me eaten alive.
Wouldn’t that just be the most ironic way to go…ever.
I snorted, hysterical laughter threatening to spew from my mouth. I was definitely losing my mind.
Something shifted across the road just then, and I froze, the threat of laughter abruptly coming to a screeching halt.